21–30 of 132 posts
Funny, seems that the author of the image in the article only uses "adult" and "rants and raves" categories on Craigslist. :)
>You might want to put lines on that graph showing that Craigslist was sued for its adult classifieds on May 4th and removed the section on September 4th. One could argue that the disruption has primarily occurred because of those events.
As a business in 2010 CraigsList derived an estimated 53% of their revenue from job listings, 30% from adult ads, and 17% from rentals. The adult ads went out the window which is going to hurt them, a LOT, in terms of both traffic and revenue. So the more material question is has CL's largest revenue category - job's - been disrupted? I was able to dig up this graph of job mention volume and it appears that CL, in th…
Not surprising, as those are markets with a supply-demand imbalance. These seem to gravitate towards marketplaces that require lots of hoop jumping, I guess because it artificially pares down the demand.
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and…
It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam.
Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed dramatically in the last decade. craigslist remains in 2001. Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties.
craigslist can keep its hideous, serifed-out visual design as long as it wants. The big beef here isn't how craigslist looks – it's how it works.
The fact your dog doesn't shit on your pillow doesn't excuse his taking a dump in your shoes every day.
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and…
There is a strong difference between UI and UX, for example, when looking through postings for stuff for sale, or places for rent - filtering by HAS IMAGE is really the only way Ill look at an ad - yet there has NEVER been a way to expand and see images. The FLAG FOR REMOVAL is and has been abused for YEARS. The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been u…
Mediocre UX makes for a better meeting ground, because when you start making things easier beyond a certain point, you start to do so at the expense of outliers. For a site like Craigslist, making 90% of people feel twice as comfortable and 10% feel less comfortable is a bad thing.
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and…
Craigslist runs something like 50MM ads every month without a leak of personal information and a user-driven moderation system, all the while fending off myriad abusers for whom free (or nearly free) advertising isn't enough and think Craigslist should be their personal global spam shitbucket. When the only thing people have to criticize you for is your appearance, I think that says a lot.
There is A LOT more to complain about than appearance.
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and…
The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the fact that craigslist is a terrible product. It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam. Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed d…
I would love it if CL's sublet section would take some hints from AirBnB. That said, CL has a much higher volume of traffic and more pressing problems - and my experience is that ABB works great in smaller markets but is as almost bad as CL in a market like NYC.
CL isn't perfect. But if most of the dogs hyped in the various dog blogs would be shitting on pillows on a regular basis, the ones that wouldn't would stand out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a strong difference between UI and UX, for example, when looking through postings for stuff for sale, or places for rent - filtering by HAS IMAGE is really the only way Ill look at an ad - yet there has NEVER been a way to expand and see images. The FLAG FOR REMOVAL is and has been abused for YEARS. The fact that an apartment or for sale posting gets flagged then immediately nobody else can see it has been u…
Craigslist is designed to make communication easier. If different people have differing ability to communicate, this makes it more difficult to communicate. Mediocre UX makes for a better meeting ground, because when you start making things easier beyond a certain point, you start to do so at the expense of outliers. For a site like Craigslist, making 90% of people feel twice as comfortable and 10% feel less comforta…
List-jacking vi the FLAG is just retarded and makes me want to punch the screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. How about some sort of reputation system? And decent moderation? As it stands, CL is a great way to (not) meet flaky people, and to have your posts taken down on the indecipherable whims of a few obsessive users. I've gotten one job, bought a few things, sold one motorcycle, and gave away most of my possessions via CL, and it was consistently an awful, frust…
It always takes more than "a few obsessive users," and there is a flag help forum on Craigslist to help explain how your ad might have trammeled your area's standards.
When I am looking for something cheap, I go to Craigslist. I don't want to have to remember 10 - 20 different site names because of different categories. That in and of itself is a great plus to Craigslist. It's all there when you get to the page...
http://d2o7bfz2il9cb7.cloudfront.net/main-qimg-c18ef2d8f8bd7...
is showing exactly the reason Craigslist is doing well.
Each of the alternatives displayed represents a specialized, vertical solution for just one (or a couple) of the categories offered by Craigslist, There is no way that Craigslist could compete head to head with every one of them anyway, at best they could choose a couple of categories and build new products focused on them.
Instead they are choosing to be a general platform.
Nothing lasts forever, and no doubt Craigslist will fade away over time, as will facebook, myspace and Windows itself, but in the meantime they are pretty well positioned, providing a 'good enough' solution for a wide range of categories is just as reasonable as providing a targetted solution to a specific category.
What they would absolutely fail to do is provide an excellent vertical solution for every category they offer,
Which means those competitors on that graph would still exist even if Craigslist improved its site, and probably they would still be doing well.